CITCON Melbourne '08

The Continuous Integration and Testing Conference (CITCON) recently held in Melbourne was full of insights.

The Friday night session taught me just how many people really don't like Brussel Sprouts and Vegemite (in isolation, though it would make an interesting mix).

This was the first Open Space conference for the majority of the attendees (including me), and I was blown away by the energy that people brought to the conference, and the number of great sessions that sprung up (see the whiteboard and the wiki).

Jeremy Wales presented on his experience with Acceptance TDD on a Suncorp project. This led to some interesting discussions on (not) using the DRY principle with acceptance tests, and having testers involved upfront in designing the tests.

Other great sessions included Continuous Performance Testing, Show us your Build!, and Using Groovy in Testing.

I've come away with a few new tools to try (including Concordion for writing active specifications, and JChav for charting JMeter results), a renewed focus on writing my tests in Groovy and plenty to read...

Thanks to all who made the conference happen. The format was fantastic and I'm already looking forward to next year.